"The summer before my ninth birthday – the summer of Nikita Khrushchev and the Berlin Wall and all the circumstances that would turn Mrs. G. into a terrifying false prophet – my parents traveled to Europe for the summer with my sister Andy, then 17. Since I was too young to appreciate such a trip, they took me to Madison, about 150 miles southwest of Green Bay, to spend the weeks with their dear friends Arlene and George.

"In most ways, it was a heavenly place to await their return. Arlene and George were among my favorite people in the whole world, kind and loving and happy just like my own parents, and they never failed to lavish some of their love on any children in their vicinity. They lived in a tree-lined neighborhood very much like our own, full of charming older homes and kids and family dogs, in a neat white two-story house.

"They had one daughter who was still at home – a girl who was probably an exotic 13 or 14 at the time, and who was much nicer to me than I would have been to a summer-long intruder. And Arlene, no doubt anticipating how homesick I would be, gave me a gift every Friday to help me celebrate making it one week closer to Mom and Dad’s return. I’ve forgotten what almost all of those gifts were, except for an Etch-a-Sketch – a drawing toy so new that I’d never even seen one before, so enchanting that I spent the rainy days of summer learning how to draw with it.

"Arlene even found a playmate for me. Her name was Maureen. She was my age and lived up the hill from Arlene’s house. Her house was exotic, too: it had no upstairs, and her backyard was all wooded, and there were these beautiful flowers in front, in a bed framed by split-rail fencing; I remember in particular stunning orange blossoms with freckles, which my new friend called tiger lilies.

"Maureen and I spent lots of long summer days together, exploring the neighborhood and the woods beyond, playing games like Sorry and Old Maid, piecing together jigsaw puzzles, packing lunches and taking off on our bikes – the daughter let me use hers! – to destinations unknown. You could do that in those days; adults didn’t worry if the children in their charge disappeared for six or eight hours, as long as they were home in time for supper.

"Thanks to this wonderful, warm cast of characters, it was one of the best summers of my childhood. Except that I wasn’t at home with my parents, and I ached for them. And so it was also the only unhappy summer of my childhood. Good and bad, rolled into one.
​
"In the end, though, the good outweighed the bad, because I knew the bad would come to an end. I had no doubt that my parents would come get me eventually and take me home, and in fact when I thought about that, when I pictured them pulling up in front of Arlene’s house, I could barely contain my joy.

"It’s kind of the way I feel now that I’m a heaven-bound Christian whose parents and Granny have gone on ahead.

"Others, even some other Christians, seem to think I’m crazy and quite possibly suicidal. But I am neither. They simply don’t understand, maybe because they never had a summer-of-1961 experience like mine.

"Which is too bad, because it’s a totally thrilling way to live.

"On the one hand, I am surrounded by people I love – a fine husband and extended family, an array of good friends, a church family whose loving-kindness is astounding. I live in a nice house with a big garden and all the pets anyone could ever want. I enjoy my work most of the time – especially since my commute is about 10 steps from the kitchen and it can be traversed in warm slippers or bare feet, depending on the season. And I spend much of my free time studying mind-blowing books about all things related to the Lord, most importantly the Bible.

"What more could I want?

"I honestly can’t think of a thing – not even my friends’ lake-side cottages or fat retirement accounts or exotic vacations could add anything to my joy. Not even another Super Bowl season for the Packers.

"Life is good.

"And yet.

"My mom and dad and Granny aren’t here. They’ve already departed for our new Home, leaving me behind, unable to get to them under my own power.  And so I am at times consumed with a new kind of homesickness – a longing to be with them in the Lord’s kingdom, a land where there are no tears, no aches and pains, no disease or death, hunger or thirst, just Jesus and joy that we can’t even imagine in our earth-bound 3D hides.

"And so I ache once again. And once again it’s mostly a good ache, one that’s accompanied by butterflies and by capital-H biblical Hope – not merely a wish but a confident expectation about what is to come.

"Life is indeed good. But it’s going to get a whole lot better one day. And it’s all going to happen in the twinkling of an eye."

​From Heaven Without Her, pages 249-251

A couple years ago, I went through a few boxes containing some items from my mother's last "real" home, a two-bedroom apartment that she had vacated for the nursing home in 1992. Imagine my surprise when I found, amidst the purses and papers, shoes and socks and winter boots, a framed print of "What Happened to Your Hand?" 

Painted by a Seventh Day Adventist named Harry Anderson back in the 1940s, it was apparently a very popular image back in the '40s and '50s. And it had hung between the twin beds in the narrow back bedroom of our house on Quincy Street -- my bedroom -- for as long as I can remember.

My mom had given it to me when I was just six years old. This I know because of what she had printed on the back (printed because obviously I wasn't yet reading script):

To Kitty from Mamma -- because I love you. January 1959. 

I like to think about how excited she must have been to give me this gift. She probably saw it in one of her women's magazines, for sale in its simple white wooden frame, and ordered it by sending in a handwritten letter with a check, or maybe even cash in those days. And she probably waited eagerly for the postman every day, anticipating its arrival. 

She might have ordered the picture for Easter -- she and my dad always gave me a present on that very special day, most memorably the record "So Dear to My Heart," the story of a boy and the black-wool lamb he raised after its mother rejected it. But if Easter was her target date, she had apparently been unable to wait that long.     

I don't remember her giving me this gift. I do hope that I expressed delight over it, at least enough to give her hope through my dark decades of atheism once I'd become an adult. 

And if it might possibly matter to her now, I hope she knows that "What Happened to Your Hand?" is once again hanging over my bed, reminding me daily of her love for me, and His, and of the kinds of gifts that mothers of that era gave their children, in order to remind them of the greatest gift of all. ​

One of the questions I’ve heard most often over my years as a nursing-home volunteer is this: How can I help my beloved unbelieving child to at least consider Christ?
 
I’ve given this question a great deal of thought: What might someone have said to capture my attention for Christ, and my heart, years earlier -- especially so that my mom and I could have had some time together in the Lord before she died?
 
Alas, I don’t have a clue.  I can’t imagine anything that anyone could have said that would not have simply infuriated me.
 
Still, my mother got through to me in the end, because through it all, she quietly and subtly continued to witness for Jesus Christ:

• She never made a secret of her commitment to Him, or of the fact that her unwavering confidence in her heavenly destiny rested solely in Him.
• Nor did she ever hide her biblical moral standards.
• She didn’t even comment when I extolled the virtues of being a feminist workaholic and, by implication, blasted the stay-at-home motherhood that had been her life.

 
Instead, she simply loved me with what came awfully close to the sacrificial, selfless agape love of God (see 1 Corinthians 13).   
 
As a result, when she died, I lost my only earthly source of unconditional and sacrificial love. Which is why it became imperative for me to search so diligently for the truth about eternity. And as God said through the prophet Jeremiah,  “you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13).
 
But is simply loving your beloved prodigal always the solution?
 
I think so -- love, together with ceaseless prayer.  I know quite a few believers who came to Christ late in life, and in nearly every case it was the combination of prayer, love and heartbreak that brought them into the kingdom of God.  
 
So if there’s a prodigal in your life, that’s my recommendation: pray without ceasing, make no secret of your beliefs, and love your prodigal into the kingdom of God.
 
Don’t worry if you don’t see fast results. As the apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 3, there’s one who plants, and another who waters, but it’s God who gives the increase – and this can all take a while! Just relax and remember that His timing is perfect.
 
In fact, don’t be concerned if you don’t see results in your lifetime. My mother did not, after all … but if she doesn’t yet know what impact she had on me, she will one happy day.  

With Mother's Day fast approaching, this may be a message worth repeating. My mom and I are pictured above in a snapshot taken circa 1958 in Door County, Wisconsin; you'll find our full story here. 

 
I’ll bet that not a week goes by without my thinking, “Mom was right about that, too.” It’s uncanny; the old woman who always seemed to think she had all the answers – really did. 

Even when I hadn’t asked for her opinion. 

Even when my life was clearly none of her business. 

Even when she was obviously so old-fashioned and out-of-touch that her opinion could be safely ignored, if at all possible while nodding silently, as if in agreement.               

That’s what I did every time she railed against alcohol and illegal drugs, claiming that they were horribly dangerous.  

How silly, I’d think while nodding thoughtfully. Getting high is fun and I am immortal. 

It's what I did when she insisted that I learn to behave like a lady, because someday those skills would come in handy. 

Yeah, right! Like I'll ever want to spend time in polite society.  

It's what I did when she told me that the #1 criterion for choosing a man to marry was respect. 

What? Me marry? How impossibly old school!

It was also how I responded when she begged me to read her Kathleen Thompson Norris novels, promising that I’d cherish them as she had.

No mystery? No suspense? No feminist doctrine or sex? No way!

And when I could bear to keep my mouth shut, it was the way I greeted her constant yammering about a God who loved me dearly.

Oh yeah? Then how come my dad died when I was just 17?  

As it turns out, my mother was right about all of these things, as well as about virtually every other piece of advice she ever gave me. Why in the world did it take me almost a half a century to figure it out?

“Wisdom is so often forged in the sufferings of experience,” wrote Ray Comfort in a footnote to 2 Chronicles 10:8 in his phenomenal The Evidence Bible. “Youth forget that the aged were once young and impetuous, and formed much of their life’s philosophies from their mistakes.”

I‘m certainly living proof of that. Now that I’m in my 60s, I have all kinds of hard-won advice that I’d love to share with wild and crazy young women.

Just about all of it would echo what my mother tried to teach me so many years ago. And somehow I expect that their silent responses would echo my own. 

Originally posted 9/14

It's sad but true: One of the fastest ways to lose a slew of long-time friends is to convert from atheism to born-again Christianity. This excerpt from Heaven Without Her explains how it works: 

My friendships with several hyper-feminists were among the casualties of my conversion.
 
Maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut. But I figured that a friend doesn’t let a friend live without hope; a friend shares the gospel with the people she cares about.
 
Trouble was, with these women, I ended up having to explain why being a Christian meant abandoning feminism.
 
“Well, it’s like this," I said to each one in separate conversations. "As a feminist, I was concerned exclusively with myself. ‘I want,’ ‘I need,’ ‘I have a right’—that’s pretty much all I thought about. Whereas Christianity teaches me to say, 'What can I do for you?'"
 
Two out of three of these friends greeted this pronouncement with a good roll of the eyes.
 
“The way I practiced it, feminism was all about me,” I said, “not about what is objectively true. It was about self-knowledge and self-righteousness and self-glorification.”
 
All three responded to this with a sigh of disgust.
 
Surliness emboldens me. “Feminism is by definition competitive,” I continued. “There are winners and losers and since I intend to win, you’d better get out of my way. Whereas faith is all about God and his perfect holiness, love, mercy, justice, and power. And there’s no contest; compared to Him, we’re all slugs, and if there were a race to righteousness, none of us would get much past the starting blocks.”
 
Amazing: In three isolated conversations, each of my soon-tobe-ex-friends glanced at her watch the moment I said “righteousness.”
 
“Feminism says the only absolute truth is that women are equal or superior to men,” I added, speaking quickly because time was obviously running out. “Faith says there are many absolute truths, with the common denominator being the Lordship of Jesus Christ.”
 
At this point, each one stood up, apparently having heard enough.
 
But I wasn’t quite done. “Feminism says she who dies with the most toys or money or power or lovers wins. Faith says she who dies in Christ wins the only prize worth having—the kingdom of heaven.”
 
If I were looking for a way to dump a friend, this would be ideal. Because none of these women has time for me anymore.
 
Which is a relief, in a way. It’s no fun being around someone who has an obvious distaste for everything you stand for. And I’m sure they feel the same way about me.

(Heaven Without Her, pages 232-234)